Up until now there have been very few effective high performance
team models. Why? The reason is because the substance and make up
of a high performance team is always somewhat or significantly
different and unique. The essence of a high performance team is
impacted by the people in the team, the leadership of team, the work
that the team is doing, how long the team has been together and the
system(s) the team finds themselves in or that the team creates.

If any one of these area's change, the team dynamics change.
Adding or taking away just one person from a team can affect team
dynamics.

There are several paradoxes of high performance teams, seemingly
opposite performance principles. For example the paradox of the freedom
to make mistakes versus the requirement for high performance standards,
the paradox of seeking out innovation and change, yet maintaining
systems and consistency.

Successful teams seem to balance these paradoxes out to achieve
peak performance. This assessment explores over 10 paradoxes in the business and sports world –
as the assessment can be used for both sports and business teams. The
core principle behind this tool is to use each team members own unique
individual insights to harness the collective intelligence and wisdom of
the team with a core focus: performance. What is happening in the
team today and what should happen tomorrow?

This allows the team
to align itself, have powerful conversations, and move towards what it
knows is best for itself. Due to the nature of using continuum's
to ask questions, the plan to implement change will reveal how many
steps are required by comparing the median and outliers of the team's
current state and desired state.

This assessment can be
used as a strategic planning input, for a team review or project
initiation, or even a team merger – the possibilities are endless. The
iTeam is just as useful when team members change, work context shifts,
the maturity of the team develops and the systems within and without the
team change, as you will always be moving towards team alignment and
what the team believes to be best for itself.

Due to the anonymous nature of the collated data, it means that team
members with extreme views can be heard and have their ideas debated –
we would typically appoint random members of the team to debate the
outliers points of view to raise awareness of the topic and move
towards a team norm or middle ground.

Example of how the iTeam works:

Where do you think your team is currently?

You know that you will be backed if you try something out of the norm and it doesn't come off. You are encouraged to try new things.

Freedom to make mistakes

High performance standards

There is a high performance culture and mistakes are not tolerated. You have one chance to do things and they need to be done right.

Each question in iTeam is about a core Team high performance
principle, with the principle being shown as a continuum. Each
side of the continuum is described in general terms, and the extreme of
each side is also defined (the extreme is not defined in this example). The user is asked to move his/her
slider to where in the continuum they perceive the team to be
today. There are no numerical scales, just the descriptors on
either side. This encourages the user to make a judgement call,
and then once that has happened, the user is asked to describe why (that function is also not added here) they
chose that particular mark on the continuum.

This process is
repeated for the desired state, the place where the user would like to
see the team going and why he/she believes that is needed. The team's current state and desired state distribution (including the team averages) are collated in a report; this includes their reasoning for Why they think things are the way they are and Why they believe things should be different.

Where do you think your team should be?

You know that you will be backed if you try something out of the norm and it doesn't come off. You are encouraged to try new things.

Freedom to make mistakes

High performance standards

There is a high performance culture and mistakes are not tolerated. You have one chance to do things and they need to be done right.

As the iTeam is completed individually and there is no obvious "right" answer what is recorded and collated is the individual perceptions of your team, and their instinctual thinking and feeling of how things should be for your team to improve its performance.

These carefully researched and identified paradoxes are fundamental to
high performance in almost every context. By harnessing the
wisdom of the team, you automatically create buy-in and a rich resource
for insight and powerful conversations.